I started this post back in June, and then took an unplanned hiatus. But we’re back!
Down the TBR Hole was originally created over at Lost in a Story.
Most of you probably know this feeling, your Goodreads TBR pile keeps growing and growing and it seems like there is no light at the end of the tunnel. You keep adding, but you add more than you actually read. And then when you’re scrolling through your list, you realize that you have no idea what half the books are about and why you added them. Well that’s going to change!
It works like this:
- Go to your goodreads to-read shelf.
- Order on ascending date added.
- Take the first 5 (or 10, if you’re feeling adventurous) books
- Read the synopses of the books
- Decide: keep it or should it go?
- Keep track of where you left off so you can pick up there next week!
Visit my to-read shelf to see how very far I still have to go!
The Lure of Long Distances by Robin Harvie
Published: April 1, 2011
On TBR Since: March 10, 2012
I love a good running memoir, especially ones from amateur athletes, so this sounded ideal. After reading some of the reviews, though, I don’t think I’m going to get to it.
Stay or Go? Go
The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear by Seth Mnookin
Published: January 25, 2011
On TBR Since: March 10, 2012
I’m pretty sure this book will make me both angry and sad, and I’m also pretty sure I need to read it.
Stay or Go? Stay
Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire by Simon Winchester
Published: December 31, 1985
On TBR Since: March 10, 2012
As much as I <3 Simon Winchester, I’ve already listened to parts of the abridged audiobook edition, and I think I’m going to give this one a pass.
Stay or Go? Go
Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth by James M. Tabor
Published: January 1, 2010
On TBR Since: March 10, 2012
The topic sounds so good, but the writing… not so much.
Stay or Go? Go
A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique & American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s by Stephanie Coontz
Published: June 30, 2008
On TBR Since: March 10, 2012
I should probably actually read The Feminine Mystique before this one, so I think it’s going to hang out in the TBR for a while yet.
Stay or Go? Stay
Taking My Life by Jane Rule
Published: October 11, 2011
On TBR Since: March 28, 2012
I’m a little apprehensive about this one because it was an unfinished manuscript published posthumously, which always gives me pause. But I think I’ll keep it.
Stay or Go? Stay
When We Were Outlaws: A Memoir of Love and Revolution by Jeanne Cordova
Published: October 18, 2011
On TBR Since: March 28, 2012
A memoir of a turbulent – and not all that far in the past, really – time.
Stay or Go? Stay
Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past by Peter Boag
Published: August 2, 2011
On TBR Since: March 28, 2012
This looks like it’s going to be pretty academic (unsurprising, given it’s published by a university press), but still interesting.
Stay or Go? Stay
Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson
Published: January 1, 2012
On TBR Since: April 4, 2012
Another one where the idea sounds interesting, but it appears to be executed better elsewhere.
Stay or Go? Go
Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics by Marion Nestle and Malden Nesheim
Published: March 2, 2012
On TBR Since: May 31, 2012
This still sounds like a pretty good cross-section of my interests.
Stay or Go? Stay
Four to go, six to stay. Chipping at the backlist, even though I’ve definitely added more than four books to the other end of the TBR in the last week.
President Bill Clinton and bestselling novelist James Patterson have written a spellbinding thriller, The President is Missing.
Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home begins at the grave of Katagiri Roshi, Natalie’s Zen teacher, in Japan. Twenty years after Katagiri’s death and Natalie’s return to New Mexico, she is permanently settled in Santa Fe with her partner, Yukwan. Except that, as Buddhism teaches us, nothing is permanent.
In 1587, 115 men, women, and children arrived on Roanoke, an island off the coast of North Carolina. Chartered by Queen Elizabeth I, their colony was to establish a foothold for England in the New World. But by the time the colony’s leader, John White, returned to Roanoke from a resupply mission in England, his settlers were nowhere to be found. They had vanished into the wilderness, leaving behind only a single clue–the word “Croatoan” carved into a tree.
Tea and books: the perfect pairing. There’s nothing quite like sitting down to a good book on a lovely afternoon with a steaming cup of tea beside you, as you fall down the rabbit hole into the imaginative worlds of Alice in Wonderland, The Hobbit, and Sherlock Holmes . . .
When Katie Met Cassidy is a romantic comedy that explores how, as a culture, while we may have come a long way in terms of gender equality, a woman’s capacity for an entitlement to sexual pleasure still remain entirely taboo. This novel tackles the question: Why, when it comes to female sexuality, are so few women figuring out what they want and then going out and doing it?
[…]But a few days later Kate receives a call from the police–Cordelia has been found dead on the mansion property, and Kate is all-but certain that her name is high on the suspect list. She finds herself juggling the murder investigation and her growing fascination with the magnificent old house that turns out to be full of long-hidden mysteries itself. Kate knows she must clear her name and save her town–before she ends up behind bars.
For all the scores of biographies of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the most famous detective in the world, there is no recent book that tells this remarkable story–in which Conan Doyle becomes a real-life detective on an actual murder case. In Conan Doyle for the Defense, Margalit Fox takes us step by step inside Conan Doyle’s investigative process and illuminates a murder mystery that is also a morality play for our time–a story of ethnic, religious, and anti-immigrant bias.
In this exciting historical mystery debut set in Victorian England, a wealthy young widow encounters the pleasures—and scandalous pitfalls—of a London social season . . .
